AMD's plans for 2011 are making the rounds as geeks love to share things that they shouldn't have access to yet. A set of slides from a presentation has hit the net, covering the positioning AMD sees for its upcoming products in the current market. AMD Vision is back in a big way with four separate logos running from HD Internet to Ultimate and even stickers denoting how many cores and GPUs are within a machine.

Several new software enhancements are also mentioned such as AMD Steady Video which is intended to remove any shakes or wiggles from video posted to the net by someone with an unsteady hand. AMD AllDay Power demonstrates the power saving features that are unique to AMD ... at least in AMDs mind ... and they tout over 10hrs usage with their upcoming products.

On the hardware side is a new name, Desna, which is AMD's answer to the tablet wars. This will be a DX11 APU which will compete to power the next generation of tablets. Hardware Accelerated Flash support certainly makes it stand out, as does enhancements to productivity software such as Office and the list of support for Win7 features. Check out the full deck of slides at NGOHQ.

In a little over three weeks’ time AMD will host their AMD Fusion Developer Summit 2011 (AFDS): a three-day conference with the hopes of promoting heterogeneous computing amongst developers. We have increasingly seen potential applications of using the parts of your computer outside the standard x86 core over the years though much of it was through NVIDIA’s brand. Building up to the summit, AMD’s DeveloperCentral talked with Lee Howes, parallel computing expert and Member of Technical Staff for Programming Models at AMD, about his upcoming session at AFDS.

I can't get over how much AFDS looks like a diagnosis.

In the short five-question interview, Dr. Howes outlined that the goal of his session is to show developers what to expect, good and bad, from developing for a heterogeneous architecture such as that of an APU. The rest of the interview was spent discussing how heterogeneous computing is currently and will eventually look like. Topics spanned from the slow perceived uptake of parallel computing in the home to the technological limitations of traditional CPUs that APUs and other heterogeneous computing systems look to bypass.

While AFDS is (by its namesake) a developer’s conference it is very much relevant to peer at for the end-user. The support for developers of newer computing architectures will help fuel the cycle of adoption between software and hardware which ends up with a better experience for us. What tasks would you like to see accelerated by heterogeneous computing? Let us know in the comments below.

On Valentine’s Day, AMD reached out to us after our relationship with Intel’s Sandy B. broke down. A mug, some chocolate, and a promise of a wonderful date with their good friend Llano was AMD’s hope to help us move on to a more stable relationship. Months have gone by and we have made up with Sandy with many a great SATAday spent together. While Llano has yet to appear, AMD did urge us to keep waiting by revealing some of her measurements and an option for another playful partner.

Llano’s GPU, as reported by Donanim Haber (translated to English), will feature 400 stream processors which will be clocked at 594 MHz. TechPowerUp also reports that it will be DirectX 11 compatible as expected and can pair up with one of AMD’s “Turks” based discrete GPUs: the HD 6570 and HD 6670. This combined GPU will be registered to the system as a Radeon HD6690 using Hybrid CrossFireX.

Just under two weeks ago we reviewed the aforementioned "Turks" based HD 6670 and 6570 with games like Left 4 Dead 2. Alone, those cards were able to play many games with antialiasing for people with monitor resolutions of 1680x1050. Llano will not perform as well as those cards but should be able to play those same games, and others, with just a few settings reduced. That said, Llano is also not a discrete card and thus it is not necessarily fair to compare it with one. Lastly, Llano can also be paired with those cards for further performance benefits making them all the more enticing for gamers not wishing to purchase higher end discrete graphics cards.

“ZOTAC International, a leading innovator and the world’s largest channel manufacturer of graphics cards, motherboards and mini-PCs, today introduces the new FUSION-ITX WiFi A-series – a world-class mainboard that combines the power of AMD Radeon™ HD graphics processing with class-leading energy-efficiency for the ultimate flexible mini-ITX form factor.

The ZOTAC FUSION-ITX WFi A-series is a great motherboard for a home theater or low power small form factor PC. Being a mini-ITX size motherboard does not mean it lacks features. This mini-ITX motherboard includes the AMD Fusion E350 APU W/ AMD Radeon HD 6310 graphics, 2 DDR3 SO-DIMM slots, an open ended PCI Express x4 slot with the capacity of handing a full x16 card, 4 SATAIII ports, 1 eSATA port, 802.11n wireless, gigabit Ethernet, a total of 10 USB ports and 8 channel audio with HDMI audio output.

It is uncommon for any motherboard to include four USB 3.0 ports. The ZOTAC FUSION-ITX WFi A-series has two on the back and two in the front. One thing to keep in mind is most cases don’t officially support USB 3.0 front ports as of yet. Will the current USB 2.0 front panel ports work at USB 3.0 speed?

The biggest advantage the AMD Fusion APU’s has over Intel’s Atom’s CPU is the graphics portion. Intel’s Atom graphics have problems with HD 1080p video, unless it is paired with NVidia’s ION graphics. This motherboard supports up to 8GB of ram and should be enough for any HTPC or SFF computer build. No fan over the APU makes for a quiet pc, and thats important if your using this motherboard for a home theater pc.

Introduction and Design

Tech journalists are finicky beasts. A few years ago we were washing netbooks in praise, declaring that they promised a new era of accessibility and portability for the PC. But now the tables have turned – tablets have usurped the throne of “cool new thing” and tech news is all too eager to declare the netbook little more than a passing trend, soon to be booted out of the market by glorious touchscreen slates.

The truth, however, is not as extreme has the headlines suggest. Netbooks are another boring reality that won’t be going anywhere soon, despite declarations of death and injury. But I can understand why they’ve lost the limelight. The improvements made to netbooks over the last three years have been incremental at best. While battery life has gradually grown, performance has barely moved. Intel, lacking competition from AMD, has had little reason to improve its Atom processors.

Now AMD has finally brought an Atom competitor to the market in the form of its Fusion APUs. We already reviewed one laptop powered by Fusion, the Toshiba Satellite C655. That laptop, however, was equipped with AMD’s single-core E-240. It provided performance roughly on par with a dual-core Atom system we tested in 2010, but ultimately fell a bit shot of our expectations.